[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation

I'm glad that no one has said no!

Of course.

Yes, I think this is absolutely okay. However, I do think that it should be periodically reviewed, say, every five years and reaffirmed that this is actually what you want.

Of course I am completely in favor of assisted suicide. Not necessarily just for terminally ill patients but those who have absolutely zero quality of life and only experience life as a series of horrible painful stressors.

It's every human being's right to choose when to end their own life. And after all, death is just the cracking of the outer shell and release into the world you always wanted to live in - it's a freeing of the spirit within and a necessary part of one's life cycle.

There's always going to be some problem around people changing their mind but, I think most people opting for such a procedure would never change their mind about it. You'd have to have them sign release and total consent forms, and I can already see this thing getting balled up in wads of red tape that will make it virtually impossible to carry out.

We already have it in the Netherlands and I think it is a good thing. I know several people who chose for assisted dying when they were terminal and I think it protected them from a lot of unnecessary suffering.

There are some laws in place to prevent abuse. For example, there is a second, independent doctor assessing the situation to make sure conditions are really met and that someone is really terminal and deciding this from their own free will. The patient should be able to reconfirm that they really want to get euthanised before it happens. I think this is a good thing, but sometimes it is difficult when people with dementia clearly have stated and written down officially that they want assisted dying in certain circumstances, but they are not able to reconfirm because they lost their ability to understand.

In some cases you can have assisted dying when you suffer psychologically without any outlook of improvement (i.e. you have tried all treatments etc). However, there are waiting lists for those, which are quite long. My sister was on such a waiting list because she had anorexia. However, she died from starvation before she could be assessed. I am still a bit in doubt whether it would have been a good idea for her to get assisted dying. I still was hoping and thinking that there could be ways for her to get better.

Maybe the doctor assessing whether she would be approved for this would have thought the same, maybe not. She died anyway, so maybe I was wrong. In any case, I am not completely against euthanasia in case of psychological illness, as people can suffer from that equally as from physical ailments. However, you should be extremely careful and it should be extremely clear that there is no other solution at all anymore.

We all know things won't get better anytime soon.

Hope yall find what peace you can in this life.

it also affects the life insurance industry. have a terminal illness with a couple months of agony left? if you end it early, they won't pay out.

Pretty sure it already is here in some capacity...

Yep. https://www.uclahealth.org/patient-resources/support-information/advance-directive/california-end-life-option-act-eoloa

Not country wide, but I live in California so I could possibly benefit from this if I ever get super fucked up.

As long as it is kept to terminally ill people. Here in Canada, it's being offered to people with life long health issues (Chronic pain etc.) But for us the slippery slope is it has been offered to people with mental health issues as well. I can't verify if it is an officially sanctioned offering, but people have come forward with stories of it being offered to them.

This would seem like the kind of question that sounds at first like a single question but causes a number of others to be unpacked. For example, would someone see a difference between simply pulling a plug, ceasing to feed someone, and administering a drug, or would this being politicized be too much of a fear...

A few things come to mind here as certainties for me. To start out, if a society for whatever reason greenlights the concept, definitely don't institutionalize/politicize it. The moment it even becomes a debate in the public sphere, pull the heck out, the concept is lost. I might not have the greatest relationship with life, but the same thoughtpath makes it hard to comprehend being all willy-nilly about it. In such a society, if anything, I'd say it should be by an individual's own breath that the candle is blown out, so to speak. Going by the same literary device, if the individual cannot produce the exhale to do that, shrug your shoulders. I would not put a dog down for this reason. By the same token, everyone should recognize the gravity of all this, which in most cases nobody does.

1000% yes

We have that in Canada. I think dying with dignity is important and why suffer in agony when you can plan it out if you're terminally ill?

But it made Canada show how poor its social supports are for this guy: https://ottawa.citynews.ca/2022/10/14/ontario-man-applying-for-medically-assisted-death-as-alternative-to-being-homeless-5953116/

When this news broke everyone came out of the woodwork to help him and he is no longer applying for MAID.

My coworker's husband has end stage COPD and has been in and out of hospital a lot lately. She says she felt pushed for him to accept MAID, but they didn't and he is doing somewhat better now. It's temporary obviously but I also understand not wanting to lose him. There have been other stories where some people feel the decision was made irresponsibly, this is a good article about it: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/22/the-death-treatment

I don't know what I think about MAID for mental health conditions. Not that I don't think they are debilitating, but I wonder how sound of mind someone who is suffering so much is in. I really don't know the answer to that.

I think in utopia it'd be great, but we don't live in utopia, and in the world we do live in, assisted suicide is just an easy out for ableist society to push us towards, because it's significantly easier to dispose of us from behind the alarmingly thin veil of "compassion" than it is to create a world where we don't struggle and suffer by default just for existing as ill or disabled people.

And it's so much easier mostly because the first step to creating an actually compassionate and inclusive world, is facing the fact that society and the individuals in it treats disabled people so badly and sees so little value in our lives, which is why so many abled people (including those making legislation, because disabled people sure aren't) would "rather die than be disabled" in the first place (or why so many disabled people have been denied treatment because their lives were deemed "not worth saving", which happens a lot more often than most people would be comfortable acknowledging), and that's simply not something most abled people are willing to do, never mind actually acting on these facts to change them.

This kind of legislation is closer to eugenics than it is disability rights.

No.

I used to think yes but canadas maid (I should have known by the abbreviation) program has been a crazy disaster and completely changed my mind.

No, for several reasons.

Death is final. There is no coming back from it.

A cure, or at least an effective treatment, might be just around the corner. HIV used to be a death sentence; it isn't any more (and from what I understand, carriers can now have unprotected sex without passing it on). I wonder how much medical research into treating HIV wouldn't have been possible without sufferers to try out potential treatments. Maybe it would still be a death sentence today if assisted suicide had allowed people to escape it.

There is no way to be 100% certain someone isn't being pressured to die. If they answer all the questions correctly, that only shows they know the right answers; it doesn't show they are being truthful.

Justifying assisted suicide on the basis of the worst cases is not sufficient. There will always be worst cases. Let's say we define a limited set of the worst cases; those are now effectively solved and everything else jumps up a level. There is now a new set of worst cases. How long before someone catching the common cold gets put to death? You may say this is ridiculous but the worst case justification means that the cold WILL eventually rise to the top, and there WILL be arguments like "giving evolution a helping hand", or "for the benefit of the species", and as we will by then be routinely applying AS there'll only be a low bar to jump.

If palliative care isn't producing sufficient quality of life, we can put people into a medically induced coma (IANAD so there may be good reasons we can't, but idk). There they stay until (a) a cure or treatment is available, or (b) they die naturally anyway.

Obviously this needs sensible public healthcare in place. Where medical treatment is expensive and life is cheap, this won't work. I'm in the UK where healthcare is provided by the state and we have the luxury of considering life to be priceless.

For those who say we euthanise animals - well society in general doesn't want to pay for their healthcare and doesn't consider their lives to be infinitely precious. Also there is the question of how much they understand what is happening to them; maybe the terror of being hooked up to a machine would make their QOL effectively non-existent anyway.